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Hickenlooper's 2004 pledge to students of Denver's Cole Middle School fulfilled, failed

By Kevin Simpson/The Denver Post

Posted:
04/08/2012 03:13:49 PM MDT

Updated:
04/08/2012 03:14:00 PM MDT

Almost six months into his first term as Denver's mayor, John Hickenlooper headed to the financially impoverished, lowest-performing middle school in the state to deliver a pep talk as a round of high-stakes testing approached.

Mulling ideas that would inspire and motivate, he settled on a simple pledge: Every student at Cole Middle School that January day in 2004 would have the money to go to college.

And the Cole Promise was born.

Eight years later, all but 33 of those 496 Cole students have left Denver Public Schools. But only 54 — just under 12 percent — of the original group have taken advantage of a scholarship program designed to fill any gaps left after federal and institutional aid.

"My wildest hope at the time was that the kids would believe it — that they would believe it and work harder," said Hickenlooper, now Colorado's governor. "What an incredible addition to the school that would be."

He had hoped for a much higher participation rate from the Cole students — perhaps 20 percent to 30 percent instead of 12 percent. For the 2009-10 school year, the latest figures available, 58 percent of all graduating DPS students enrolled in some form of post-secondary education.

"If nothing else," he said, "it shows how far we still have to go."

Although the announcement seemed a little bit off-the-cuff at the time, Hickenlooper already had been in discussions to procure private scholarship funding for all DPS students.

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After talking with an anonymous benefactor, the mayor determined that enough money had been committed to cover the Cole students — so he sprung the announcement.

Hopes ran high. Hickenlooper said he based his calculations on an estimate that it would take $500,000 to $750,000 to fulfill his pledge. So far, only about $222,000 in scholarship money has been distributed to that original group of Cole students.

"If anything, I'm hopelessly, overly optimistic on things like this, that you'll be able to reverse cultural determinants," Hickenlooper said. "A lot of these kids have faced challenges their entire life."

Nearly all students at Cole qualified for the free or reduced-price lunch program, a common poverty indicator. But there have been other challenges as well.

Many students attending Cole that day in 2004 had been brought into the country illegally, and for them the original promise hasn't been entirely fulfilled. Others had difficulty navigating the application process. And any unifying effect of the mayor's promise on the student body dissolved as school closures scattered students in all directions.

Nicole Veltzé, then principal at Cole and now principal at North High School, isn't surprised — at least in retrospect — at the low participation rate.

"Back then, it would have surprised me," she said. "Had we been able to keep momentum and continuity, the number would have been drastically different."

That continuity took a blow when the state closed Cole in May 2005, a little more than a year after Hickenlooper's promise, because of persistent low test scores and converted it to a charter school. Then, a year later, the district closed Manual High School.

And that, Veltzé said, diminished the unity of a mission that had been greeted with high expectations at the announcement of the Cole Promise.

"When that headline hit, it was a very big deal, very inspirational not just to kids, but to parents and the whole community," Veltzé said. "But then kids got dispersed to lots of different schools. We couldn't keep them together to carry on that promise as a unified force."

Administration of scholarships from the Cole Promise goes through the Denver Scholarship Foundation, a charity that has partnered with DPS and, with its inception in 2006, embraced the larger vision to provide college funding for all Denver students.

This year, the Cole scholarships range from $1,100 to $6,000, depending on level of need, type of school and whether a student attends full time or part time.

To qualify, students who were in sixth, seventh or eighth grade at Cole in 2004 must have graduated from DPS with at least a 2.0 grade-point average and applied for federal student aid.

Those Cole students who don't meet the foundation's qualifications — including undocumented students who can't seek federal aid — can access funding through the Latin American Educational Foundation.

So far, 20 undocumented students have taken advantage of the program, according to community organizer Patty Lawless of the Metro Organizations for People, which helped negotiate the issue with the mayor's office.

But those undocumented students can only access enough to cover in-state tuition rates, even though state schools charge them out-of-state tuition. So for some students, that leaves gaps of thousands of dollars — gaps that can price them out of the college market.

For other students such as Ana, whose mother brought her into the country illegally when she was 9, it has meant piecing together tuition with a patchwork of other grants and a full-time job. And her scholarship money will run out before she attains her degree at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

But she said that, given the tricky politics of immigration, Hickenlooper made at least a good effort to keep his promise.

"I'm grateful," said Ana, who asked that her last name not be used because of possible repercussions. "He was attacked for it. For the circumstances we live in, and the consequences he brought upon himself for doing that, he did what he could."

Still, Veltzé said the difficulty for undocumented students has contributed significantly to the low number of Cole students to take advantage of the opportunity.

But she added that the mechanism to get the overall program rolling wasn't firmly in place.

"That first set of kids that would have been eligible, I remember people calling me to say, 'How do we get hold of this?' " she said. "Because we weren't ready to go at the beginning of kids' senior year."

William Serpas, 23, remembers being excited as an eighth-grader when he heard the mayor's promise — and encouraged that he might one day become the first in his family to go to college.

But while Cole Promise money helped Serpas, who's currently enrolled at Metro State, he isn't surprised — only sad — that relatively few of his classmates took advantage.

"I remember a lot of kids, their parents didn't support the cause of college," he said. "They wanted them to work. Or they were in trouble, had kids at a young age. Even me, I had a kid when I was in ninth grade. But I tried to be positive, that I'm going to make it."

Despite spending much of his high school years homeless and fending for himself, 22-year-old Marray Napue also seized on the scholarship money to make his way to Colorado State University.

"In my mind, it was the break I needed," said Napue. "I looked at it as a way out. But for a lot of them, it didn't register. It seemed like college, for them, was not the next stop."

Despite the disappointing numbers, Veltzé figures that for all the problems with the Cole Promise, it has been well worth the money and effort to encourage post-secondary education for kids who might never have considered it.

"Every single individual child we can send to post-secondary education is completely important," Veltzé said. "Whether it's 1 or 3 or 15 or 20 percent, it's that many more students who can access it. The promise and drive did shape many of those kids."

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